With their latest outage, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides business leaders with a stark reminder: The public cloud is not infallible, the public cloud does not guarantee high availability and when it goes down, it does it magnificently. Which is why Hybrid IT is so valuable.

Amazon Web Services is the consensus leader of the IaaS public cloud computing market according to industry watchers, but they credit Microsoft for closing the gap with Azure and say Google with its Cloud Platform has made considerable strides as well.

The speaker will sell for $ 129 when it goes on sale later this year, according to a report in Android Police. Google Home, which the company first introduced at its I/O developer conference in May, is a speaker that also has Google Assistant built in. (You can preview the assistant in the company’s new messaging app, Allo.) It can also control smart home devices, complete searches and help you manage tasks like managing your grocery list. Read more…

Research firm IDC is out with its latest semi-annual tracking of IaaS public cloud vendors and while the top provider in this market – Amazon Web Services – will not surprise you, numbers two and three just might.

IDC estimates that IBM’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud revenues are larger than those of Microsoft in this still-emerging market.

As SAP holds its annual Sapphire Now user conference in Orlando this week, two of the leading IaaS providers are making the case for running SAP apps on their public clouds.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined SAP CEO Bill McDermott during the Sapphire keynotes on Tuesday to announce a broad partnership between the two companies that will optimize the Azure public cloud to run SAP workloads.

Amazon is a massive company that brings in a ton of money but doesn’t necessarily make much profit.

That’s due to its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. He doesn’t really care that much about making a profit. He’s said as much publicly.

This tends to make it difficult to predict just how Amazon will do in comparison to expectations for its quarterly earnings reports. Amazon’s earning reports tend to be some of the most exciting, but are also frustrating for analysts and investors.

On Thursday, Bezos had yet another surprise for them — a massive chunk of profit from its first quarter of 2016.

Amazon.com caves to PR flak for disabling encryption on Kindle Fire tablets, and other devices using the ‘droid-fork Fire OS 5. In a one-line statement released today, Amazon says encryption will return to Fire OS.

Well, that didn’t take long. Despite Amazon PR’s earlier explanation that users didn’t care for the feature, it’s now saying you can have it back. Mind you, why would you want it, given the utterly weak CPUs inside these nasty, cheap tablets?

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India is front and centre for most tech companies right now due to its powerhouse economy, expected to become the world’s second-largest smartphone market behind China by 2020, and it’s absurdly huge population — and like China, it’s hard for outsiders to really grasp just how big this place is.

That’s why eyebrows are being raised over the weekend at news that top execs from two major foreign tech giants with big investments in India have been quitting.

Amazon India’s lifestyle and fashion head, Vikas Purohit, has “moved on for personal reasons,” the company toldThe Economic Times in a statement. Meanwhile, two top execs at Line, Japan’s hugely popular mobile messaging app that has been trying to push into emerging markets, have quit the India business to do their own startup.

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In a statement given to the Times, Line’s business head for India, Damandeep Singh, said, “Over the past couple of years, Rajat and I got a chance to see a lot of business models explode on the mobile front in the Japanese and Korean market. No one monetises mobile like the way it happens in Japan.”

“We identified some unique opportunities that can be beneficial to the Indian market, with a bit of a desi touch, and there exists a gap in the market right now on content consumption. So we tried to address that in our new business,” he added. Without saying what specifically that new business is, all we know right now is that it will be a “content-based app.”

We have reached out to Line for further comment. Amazon India has still not replied to our request for comment.

As to Amazon’s statement, it was more vague and corporate: “Vikas Purohit has moved on from Amazon.in for personal reasons. [He] built a strong fashion business for Amazon.in from scratch. Since the launch of the fashion category in September 2013, the fashion store has emerged as one of the top three stores on Amazon.in, both in terms of volume and value.”

Amazon India’s vice president of global vendor management, Susan Saideman, is expected to take over the fashion business until the company can “identify a new leader.” It will want to do so quickly: it’s facing increased competition from local rivals on a number of fronts.

The truth is that Purohit’s resignation will sting — he was considered “one of the four pillars of Amazon India,” with fashion and lifestyle “one of the best possible growth engines for ecommerce companies in India,” according to the newspaper.

As for Line, the company is known to be eying opportunities in emerging markets like India. Last month, it rolled out a “Lite” version of its mobile messaging app that is less data-heavy for users on cheaper price plans, and updated its Android app with a new focus on low-cost calling. But it’s still facing uncertain times as it yet again delayed an IPO due to poor market conditions.

In any case, India is a market that waits for no one. Both companies will want to sort out their top ranks quickly, and do their best to keep them in going forward.

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Online grocery buying is one of the marketing venue’s that usually looks to be on the cusp of succeeding or failing. You can start hearing radio commercials, or the odd TV or radio ad, perhaps you’ll even see one of the evasive Shop & Stop PeaPod delivery trucks, but unless you work continually, you are terribly sick or an invalid with no other means of buying yourself food ( but you thankfully have a Net connection ) -it appeared so extremely lazy. Not to mention wasteful considering they would need to tack on the extra dear for delivery. Continue reading “Grocery Shopping Online: Helping the future hermit in all of us.” »